At the Rene Cazenave Apartments at 25 Essex St., 120 formerly homeless or destitute San Francisco residents have found a home in the first new housing development in San Francisco’s booming Transbay district.

The 120-unit building, developed by nonprofits Bridge Housing and Community Housing Partnership, opened to tenants in December. The $50 million project is now nearly 100 percent leased and provides “supportive housing apartments” for very poor, formerly homeless people referred by the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Direct Access Housing program.

The eight-story building, named after Community Housing’s founding board member Rene Cazenave, includes 12 one-bedroom apartments and 108 studios, each with a private bathroom and kitchenette and floor-to-ceiling windows that are designed to help residents feel “more connected to the outside and to provide more light,” said Vanna Whitney of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, which designed the project.

Overall, 10 percent of the units are handicap accessible and the other units are adaptable for handicap use. Ground floor spaces include a wide range of programming space and 3,395 square feet of retail space. Other features of the building include a resident lounge, a rooftop garden full of drought-resistant, native plants that drains water into a collection tank, an outside courtyard and 24-hour service at the front desk.

The University of California, San Francisco delivers counseling and other support services to the residential complex.

“It’s a compact site for 120 apartments,” said Richard Stacy of Leddy Maytum Stacy noting that the layout challenges the standard way of organizing a building that offers social services, making the social services “front and center” on the ground floor of the building, while also trying to provide a sense of privacy with features like blurred glass and some private meeting rooms.

The project, part of the city’s mostly unsuccessful Ten Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness, is “comprehensively dealing with the challenge of the local citizens,” by providing what Bridge Housing describes as permanent supportive housing, said project manager with the organization, Robert Stevenson. “It’s miraculous for them, and it’s a positive impact on the city.”

The rent for the apartments is based on a percentage of each resident’s income — typically 30 percent — and averages $375 a month. As the low rents do not cover the building’s operating costs, the city subsidizes the building to meet those costs, said Michael Chao, a project manager with CHP.

“San Francisco has proactively said, if you fund housing, you’re taking people off the street and saving money,” Chao said. “It’s more expensive to take someone to the hospital and pay for hospital housing than it is to (provide permanent housing).”